Dr. Angela P. Vargas

is a licensed psychologist in the States of New Jersey and New York. Dr. Vargas graduated from Fordham University with a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology. She completed a Pre-Doctoral Clinical Internship at Lincoln Hospital (Bronx, NY) and Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Audrey Hepburn Children’s House, Hackensack University Medical Center (Hackensack, NJ). Throughout her trajectory in the psychology field, Dr. Vargas has also been actively involved in research and writing that has sought to understand the interplay between various cultural factors and individual development. At present and in addition to private practice work, Dr. Vargas practices in a NYC hospital where she engages in clinical services and supervision/teaching for psychology trainees.

Dr. Vargas has extensive education, training, and experience in the field of mental health across the lifespan, with communities of diverse backgrounds and resources, and within inpatient and outpatient settings. Specialty areas include treatment of mood disorders and trauma via individual, group, and family therapies, as well as psychological assessment (cognitive, academic, forensic, and personality) and comprehensive evaluations. Dr. Vargas particularly enjoys working with adolescents and individuals navigating major life transitions and issues surrounding identity (racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation). She employs a warm and open approach to psychotherapy that pulls from different modalities, depending on the client’s individual needs, and is sensitive to cultural factors that impede or facilitate therapy engagement. Dr. Vargas places great value on the therapeutic relationship and the experiential aspect to psychotherapy.

If you are like many Americans, you are concerned about the growing achievement gap between rich and poor children. It is the not-so-secret epidemic happening in plain sight. By 2020, more than 65% of American jobs will require at least a four-year college degree, meaning that less affluent children who are failing to do well in elementary and high school right now are preparing to be left out of economic opportunity and will continue the disastrous cycles of generational poverty, community violence, and mass incarceration.

Just as children suffering from chronic hunger are listless, lethergic, unfocused and thus have grave difficulty attending to a school lesson, so do children suffering from chronically low self-esteem experience similar challenges. Just as poverty is toxic to the child's brain, flooding cerebral areas essential for learning with the stress hormone/neuro-chemical cortisol, so is diminshed self-worth toxic to the mind and heart of a child.

Only moments before I had brought up the anecdote of my 7-year-old daughter’s experience at a spelling bee in which everyone won because the children who were not prepared to do well were given on-the-spot assistance from a teacher; I employ the anecdote as a vehicle to discuss my deep conviction that when we shield children from failure we are invariably denying them an opportunity for growth.